dehaze

In the context of Design Sprint, we use the word prototype in a slightly different way than in standard product development. A design sprint prototype is a facade of the experience you have envisioned in the sketch phase.

You are building just the barest elements of what you need to make the
prototype real enough to get an authentic response from a potential user in
the Validate phase. This means mapping out the exact flow for the experience
and only building the steps you want to test. There is no need to build a fully
functional back-end or to solve for every flow in your product.

You can think of your prototype as an experiment in order to test out a
hypothesis. This means you have to think critically about what you will build
in order to get the feedback you need to validate or invalidate your
hypothesis.

Anything can be prototyped in a day if it is clearly mapped out.

For example:

One of your sprint questions might be “Do my users want to spend time building
a profile and customizing their experience, or would they rather have this
automated for them?". You can ask your users this question, but you might also
want to build out a portion of this flow in order to test if they will actually
do it.